


Walking the Line

by MillyVeil



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Angst, Atlantis, I don't know how to tag this, POV Rodney McKay, suggestions?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-23
Updated: 2019-07-23
Packaged: 2020-07-12 08:11:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19942972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MillyVeil/pseuds/MillyVeil
Summary: Sheppard lift his hands like 'jeez', and Rodney suddenly wants to grab him by the front of his stupid Woody Woodpecker shirt and shake him hard. He wants to explain to him in very small words (because apparently Sheppard didn't quite get it the first time around) that all of them werethis closeto start glowing in the dark. He wants to ask if Sheppard has any idea what it feels like to be reduced to tampering blindly with a system you don't fully understand, to guess your way through a minefield where if you make a wrong move, you're not the one to die.





	Walking the Line

**Author's Note:**

> So, a note for my Marvel fic followers: this is obviously not a Marvel fic. I was digging through some old folders on my computer and found a load of Stargate Atlantis fics that I wrote _ages_ ago (ETA: went back to check just _how_ long ago. 12 years. Holy. Cow. It boggles the mind. Yup. Mind is boggled). Ranni suggested I post them here, and I figured, why not. My old pen name on LJ was Spacebabe (not because I wrote Stargate fics, though! This pen name existed waaaay before that, and hails from the fact that I have a degree in aerospace engineering. I just felt the need to explain that, because that's a HORRIBLE pen name!)
> 
> Random observation: for some reason my SGA stories are all much shorter than my Marvel fics. Weird that.

Rodney doesn't have a problem with deadlines in general. Not really. What he objects to is Pegasus' predilection to the _dead_ part, and the way he almost invariably finds himself on the wrong side of the stopwatch.

He’s discovered that the best way to beat the damn stopwatch is by applying equal measures of experience, logic, and brute force to the problem at hand. It's not always pretty, but more people live than die, and that has to count for something.

* * *

  
Beckett has stopped talking and Rodney shifts his attention back to the infirmary bed in front of him. Sgt. Henson is curled up around himself in a manner that tells Rodney he's in a lot of discomfort. A concussion and some minor burns to the forearm, and he sure as hell isn't getting any compassion from Rodney.

"I'm sorry," Rodney says unapologetically and crosses his arms. He turns his glare on the group of people around Henson's bed. "Did any of you happen to see if the fairy godmother came earlier today and paid the good sergeant here a visit?"

Beckett’s pen stops on the medical chart and he squints up at Rodney. 

"Okay, fine," Rodney snaps. "I guess technically the tooth fairy could have been in on it, but my bet is still on the fairy godmother, because tooth fairies don't usually beat people over the head with what must have been a planet-sized stupid stick!" He can't help the volume with which that last part comes out.

Sheppard just arches an eyebrow. "I don't think fairy godmothers do that either, actually," he says mildly.

"You have a better explanation? I sure as hell don’t, because god knows I've told you people enough times: don't touch anything that hasn't been cleared!"

Sheppard sighs. "McKay, calm down."

"Calm down? Do you have any idea the damage it would have caused if I hadn't been able to short out the feedback loop that idiot created!?"

"I'm guessing a lot," Sheppard says, and right there is that infuriating tone of voice that never fails to rile Rodney up further, because it is so neutral and so accommodating, and it feels like he's being patronized.

"Does the word Naquadah mean anything to you, Colonel? Na-qua-dah!" Rodney uses both hands to emphasize the word. "You know, alien element, powers the generators, goes _ka-boom_ when unstable?"

The panicked call had come from Charest less than two hours ago, and Rodney and his team had soon been dividing their attention between trying to sweet-talk Atlantis into letting them back into the system core and eviscerating control consoles all over the city to find a way to somehow dissipate the power build-up in the north-eastern generator.

Sheppard had coordinated the evacuation of the entire section F, including the generator room, but there hadn't been enough time, not nearly enough time, and Rodney remembers the metallic taste in his mouth when Atlantis stopped believing in his desperate work-arounds and the claxons had taken up their dissonant chanting. A moment later Sheppard's voice had come over the radio, informing him that the generator area had been locked down, and oh, did he mention that he and a handful others were still on the wrong side of the door, so could Rodney please stop twiddling around and get them out?

"Ka-boom," Rodney repeats, mostly to get himself back on track.

Sheppard just nods, calmly, like they're discussing the weather. "Exactly how close were we?"

Rodney doesn't say one minute and twelve seconds close, because thinking about it feels a little like pressing his tongue against a broken tooth.

"The control protocols I wrote when we first got the Mark IIs would have limited the explosion, so Atlantis wouldn't have turned into that much dust. But still, I can guarantee," he stabs a finger in Sheppard's direction, "you would've had to use up a couple of your remaining video game lives to survive the blast." He runs his hands through his hair, not knowing what to do with the residual desperation that still vibrates within. His hair feels coarse and gritty. "Not that it would've mattered," he mutters.

"Excuse me," Sheppard affects a hurt expression. "I happen to think my survival matters quite a lot."

Rodney happens to think so too, but he's too tired to think of a way to agree without it sounding like he's saying something more, and god, it sucks that he's the one who has to watch his every word when Sheppard can get away with _anything_.

He pinches the bridge of his nose. "What I mean is that you would’ve had less than four seconds to enjoy your continued state of aliveness before you and anyone else near the generator room would have been exposed to somewhere in the vicinity of 5 kilorads."

Rodney sees Beckett freeze in the middle of arranging Henson's IV lines. Sheppard's eyes just make the tiniest of startled movements. It is enough to tell him that both of them just grasped the magnitude of what didn't happen.

"Five--?" Beckett croaks. "Was there--? I mean, are you sure there's no--" He looks sick.

Rodney snags his jacket off the back of the chair and shoves his arms through the sleeves. It smells like melted plastic and chemical fire extinguisher. "Oh, yes, Carson, because I am _obviously_ the kind of person who would wait an hour to tell you about a radiation leak that would make Chernobyl look like--" He stops and presses the heels of his palms into his eyes until strange non-colors move in the darkness behind his eyelids. These are the days he misses the copious amounts of vodka that Siberia had to offer. "We're okay," he says. "Atlantis would have thrown the mother of all hissy fits if there had been any contamination."

The room is silent around him.

"We're okay," Rodney repeats, and he concentrates on dulling the edge that wants to lace his words, because Beckett still looks terrified. "The generator is off-line and all sections are running on auxiliary power. The main relays and wiring that Mr. Can't-Keep-His-Hands-To-Himself reduced to smoldering pieces of charcoal and melted plastic will be replaced in the morning." He takes a dark kind of pleasure in seeing Henson cringe.

"The only real damage was the fire in the relay station when they blew," he continues. "And thanks to the fact that literacy doesn't seem to be a criterion when SGC recruits their military personnel, we now have the pleasure of cleaning a full room of Ancient consoles covered in this." He slaps his hand against the sleeve of his jacket and a small cloud rises into the air. "Who the hell uses a powder extinguisher on an electrical fire? Especially when there is a clearly marked CO2 extinguisher right next to it?"

Beckett nods, but his expression is still strained, and Rodney can't blame him. Someone pressed a badge-sized radiation detector in Rodney's hand when he went down to the generator room to survey the damage, and he pinned it to the front of his jacket. He can't quite bring himself to take it off just yet, and the hesitation has nothing to do with reason or logic, because like he just told Beckett, there really is no danger anymore. He just seems to have discovered a previously unknown appreciation for that particular luminous nuance of green. It’s a much-needed reminder that nothing happened.

Sheppard shifts and frowns, and Rodney glares back out of habit. Sheppard was off duty when the alarm came, and it shows in the sneakers and the non-regulation long-sleeved t-shirt he's wearing.

“Wow," Sheppard finally says.

It's only thanks to prolonged exposure that Rodney knows that Sheppard isn't anywhere near as untroubled as he looks. Rodney's fingers fumble with the zipper to his jacket. "As always, your eloquence amazes me," he mumbles.

"Guess we were lucky." Sheppard's grin doesn't hold any humor at all.

Rodney is dead tired and it's easy for him to let his focus go long, miles beyond the stark wall behind Sheppard. "Yeah," he says hollowly. He thinks of the acrid smell of fried circuits. Of Russian roulette. "Lucky," he says.

When he blinks the room back in focus, Beckett is frowning at him and there's a pained tilt to Sheppard's brows, and Rodney knows he thinks that he just bruised Rodney's ego.

He just doesn't get it.

"Rodney-"

"I'm leaving now," he says to no one in particular.

No one tries to stop him.

* * *

He is halfway to his quarters when he hears the steps come up behind him in the deserted hallway.

"Rodney, wait up."

Rodney doesn't want to wait. He wants to get to his room and take a long, warm shower and forget everything he can't deal with right now, everything he can't touch, because god, he can't talk about it. Can't talk about how there are simulations and calculations still open on the screens in his lab, calculations that he'll have nightmares about for the rest of his life.

Sheppard's hand on his shoulder stops him. The touch is apology and warning rolled up in one, and Rodney shrugs it off, because he hates it when Sheppard does that, hates it when he tries to coax Rodney into compliance when he has every right in the world to react like this, when no more than an hour ago Rodney had been running simulation after simulation, trying to figure out how much power he had to bleed off from the Mark II generator to make sure Atlantis didn't crumble into a million pieces when it blew, while at the same time making sure that the inevitable explosion, when it hit, would be enough to make sure there was absolutely no way that the people trapped on the wrong side of the lead-clad blast doors could survive it.  
  
Because that would ultimately have been more merciful than leaving the seven of them stuck in there to die hours later; out of reach of medical care, blast injured, sick and in excruciating pain from the inescapable and fatal radiation poisoning that would follow.  
  
But in the end (the _very_ end; Rodney can still hear the soundless tick-tick-tick of time running out) he and his team had been able to stop the explosion altogether, and he hadn't had to kill Sheppard or the other six expedition members trapped with the generator.

One minute and twelve seconds.  
  
Sheppard reaches for him again, but Rodney glares at him. Sheppard lift his hands like 'jeez', and Rodney suddenly wants to grab him by the front of his stupid Woody Woodpecker shirt and shake him hard. He wants to explain to him in very small words (because apparently Sheppard didn't quite get it the first time around) that all of them were _this close_ to start glowing in the dark. He wants to ask if Sheppard has any idea what it feels like to be reduced to tampering blindly with a system you don't fully understand, to guess your way through a minefield where if you make a wrong move, you're not the one to die.

But Sheppard doesn't take kindly to being manhandled like that, and Rodney isn't sure he'll be able to let go if he puts his hands on him right now.

So in the end, Rodney just walks away.

* * *

The rest of the walk is blessedly uneventful. Sheppard doesn't follow and Rodney radios Zelenka who tells him 'yes, all is still under control and please, go to bed and stop wasting my time'. He signs off and pulls the radio from his ear.

When he gets to his quarters he doesn't bother with the light. He stumbles to the unmade bed and sits there, staring into nothingness for a moment before rolling over onto his back and closing his eyes.  
  
He doesn't remember falling asleep, but he wakes during the night and finds his clothes scattered across the floor. He doesn't remember taking them off. He doesn’t remember turning on every single lamp in his room, either, and it takes a few moments for him to focus enough for his thoughts of 'off _, off dammit_ ', to be recognized by Atlantis.  
  
When his room sinks into darkness, he lies down and blinks away the ghost-images that linger before his eyes. There is no warm body pressed up against his, no clothes hung over the back of the chair by his desk. Rodney is still alone. He scrubs his hand over the raspy stubble on his face. After getting out from the generator area, Sheppard had been busy with the clean-up, and Rodney doubts he'd had time to talk to Zelenka or any of the other people on Rodney's team by the time they'd met in the infirmary. He wonders if Sheppard knows now, if someone has told him. He hopes someone has, so he doesn't have to, because he's not sure he can do it without coming apart at the seams.

Tomorrow the post-mortem will start. Investigations, inquiries, reports. Maybe by then Rodney will feel a little less like he's under water, like he's drowning. Fatigue presses down on him like a weight, but sleep is recalcitrant, unwilling to return without a fight. He lies there in the darkness and tries to blanket his mind with enough mental white noise to slide under again, but it's easier said than done. 

When he finally succeeds, dawn is reaching across the water for Atlantis, and his dreams are strange and terrifying, filled with the anthracite smell of gunpowder.  
  
~ The End ~


End file.
